


Small Mercies

by Fickle Ghost (Fickleghost)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, F/M, French Revolution, Reign of Terror, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 06:44:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fickleghost/pseuds/Fickle%20Ghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <i>The Terror begins, and people start to lose their heads, pitting neighbour against neighbour. And then they really begin to lose their heads.</i>
  </p>
</div>The Revolution sows chaos and order in equal measure, and Dave and Rose attempt to lose themselves in the cracks between.
            </blockquote>





	Small Mercies

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a bonus round of the HSWC at about 2am, and I'm still not entirely sure how much I like it.

Rose **click-click-clicks** her needles deep into the night now. Dave finds it easier to sleep when he can hear them, and he’ll wake up in the middle of the night holding his breath because she stopped to switch skeins or pour herself another glass of red, red wine.

 

_[Rose doesn’t sleep anymore, she just knits and knits and knits and knits and]_

_[Dave is too…something to ask what exactly she’s making, and during her pauses, when his mind is free to run wild, he thinks it’s probably safer that he doesn’t]_

  
  
By day, they attempt to live as quietly as possible—the former clockmaker and his spinster sister, who used to be a hair richer than their neighbours before the famine and revolution and the national razor took hold. Good people, quiet people, people without enemies. Remarkable only in their unremarkability. But then again, the two of them have practice at keeping secrets; they’ve been doing it most of their lives, after all.

_[too much sour wine and little crescent moon marks on skin and quiet sighs in the depths of the night, buried in pillows to keep quiet]_

  
  
For a while, they think they might come out of this unscathed; early on, they make a tacit agreement not to pick a side. The fight between the Jacobins and the Girondins is too dangerous a mess for even them to get involved in, adept as they are at surviving tangled knots of politics.

 

_[The match, if Rose was being honest, was very favourable to her—he was wealthy, with a modest standing amongst the second estate and a moderately sized plot of land outside the city.]_

_[but he was not as blonde blonde blonde as herself and his eyes didn’t have hints of burgundy in them when the light caught them right.]_

_[She hated him.]_

_[He stopped calling abruptly in the middle of their courtship, to her great pleasure.]_

  
  
It does not last though, and soon Rose is whispering plans into her pillow and his ear. You join the Jacobins, and I the Girondins, she murmurs, hair tickling his cheeks and she mouths the words feather-light against his jaw. And that way we shall keep each other safe.  
  
Yes, he whispers back, bucking under her ministrations. She takes him into her mouth then, and he calls out, heedless of too thin walls. He does not think on it again until the morning when he wakes up alone.

_[They do not grow up together, raised apart from an early age until they are beyond recognition to one another. Perhaps that is how it all begins. Because at first they do not recognize each other, and it is simply a game, the way they push each other and push each other until they cannot hold out, stealing kisses in doorways and fumbling with laces in back alleys.]_

_[It is always, at first, simply a game. Until it is not.]_

  
  
Dave tricks himself into thinking they will still come away from this safely, that it will not unravel in their hands at the slightest tug. They agree to keep low profiles within their respective parties, to avoid drawing too much attention and make it all the easier to keep each other safe. But Rose, Rose is too brilliant to slip through the cracks. It was foolish to think that no one would notice her sharpness, her knife-bright intelligence.  
  
She rises through the ranks.

_[They do not even have the decency to be embarrassed when they discovered their shared blood. If anything, it seems to draw them to each other all the more. There is too much between them now to ever stop, even if they wanted to. They are already damned in the eyes of man.]_

_[They might as well enjoy themselves while it lasts.]_

  
  
Rose avoids the spotlight whenever possible, and it is because of her discretion that her rise is swift rather than meteoric. Small mercies, in the end. Dave, for all his flamboyance, is much better at playing the starry-eyed loyal fool to his party leader’s philanthropic yet steely general. In the end, though, it is not Dave who is on the losing side.  
  
The fighting between the two parties becomes increasingly ferocious, if pointless. They are too evenly matched, until the Jacobins take the convention and all their carefully laid plans are dashed to pieces.  
  
Three months later, the Terror begins.

 

  
_[What they do is vanity of the highest form, both of them pulled to the vision of themselves in each other, like Narcissus and the lake, ensnared by their own reflection.]_

_[Rose presses kisses to the long thin fingers, the sharp hips of her brother so like her own, traces the lines where childhood scars would be on her own body. Dave knots his hand in hair just a shade darker than his own, tilts her head to find the angle where the slope of her neck looks like it could be his own, and kisses his own freckles along her shoulders.]_  


The Terror begins, and people start to lose their heads, pitting neighbour against neighbour. And then they **really** begin to lose their heads. Dave begs her to quit, to call the whole thing off and go back to living like ghosts for fear of someone looking too hard at them. Rose agrees, stops going to the meetings and returning their letters. She drops off the face of the earth.  
  
It is how she narrowly misses being part of the first wave of executions.  
  
Dave drops out right afterwards in a moment of panic, and the two of them retreat to their home and each other.

 

_[Dave wakes up smelling blood for weeks. Rose takes up knitting shortly after.]_  
  
 _[twenty-nine stitches. Twenty-nine stitches for twenty-nine names, for twenty-nine heads.]_  
  
  
The arrest warrants come in the weeks that follow, their faces plastered all across Paris, along with words like ‘Traitors’ and ‘Fornicators’. In their own way, they become quite famous, hunted by Jacobin and Girondin alike. They have no hope of escape, they know, not once the murder of Marat is pinned on the pair of them.  
  
So instead they wait, and sleep, and watch.

_[Dave does not so much fear dying as dying without her. He cannot tell if the idea of leaving her behind or being left behind terrifies him more.]_  
  
 _[He listens for the **click-click-click** of her needles, to make sure she has not been taken in the night without him.]_  
  
  
 _[Rose fears dying about as much as she fears Dave, which is to say not at all. If she’s being honest with herself, as she is increasingly in the small hours of the morning, she’s surprised they lasted this long.]_  
  
 _[Rose fears death about as much as she fears Dave, which is too say that they both terrify her beyond belief because she does not know what will happen once she’s **gone**.]_

  
  
  
  
They die together in the end, Rose first, and then Dave.

_[small mercies, in the end.]_

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Terror ran roughly from September 1793 after the Jacobins took over the national convention--arresting and later executing 29 Girondist leaders--to July 1794 when a coup that overthrew Robespierre, the Jacobin politician responsible for the Reign of Terror.
> 
> Over 2,600 "enemies of the revolution" were executed in Paris alone during the Terror, and the guillotine was nicknamed the National Razor and became a symbol of the revolution. 
> 
> Jean-Paul Marat was a popular radical journalist who sympathized with the Jacobins and helped to remove the Girondists from power in 1793. He was assassinated in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday on July 3 and became a symbol of the Jacobin cause, immortalized in the painting ["The Death of Marat"](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Marat).


End file.
